Contagion

Remember fomites, r-naught, social distancing?

I was given a sad reminder of these terms last week when I watched a rerun on Netflix of Steven Soderbergh’s movie “Contagion.”

It’s eerie how a movie produced way back in 2011 almost accurately depicted pandemic events that would happen a decade later, using terms that would become household words beginning in 2020.

 And how the fictional virus that would kill about 70 million people before being placed under control was traced to wildlife. A bat passed on the virus to a pig, which was slaughtered and then handled for cooking by a chef in a Macau casino restaurant, who shook hands with one of the movie’s stars, Gwyneth Paltrow.

Aside from Paltrow, the impressive ensemble cast includes Matt Damon, Jude Law, Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard and Elliott Gould.

The “Contagion” production team based the story on the SARS outbreak in 2002-2004 and the H1N1 or swine flu pandemic that killed 284,000 people from 2009 to 2010. And the team consulted experts from the World Health Organization (WHO), among others, for scientific accuracy.

When SARS-CoV-2 jumped out of China’s Wuhan City and began its global rampage in early 2020, there were fears that “Contagion” would become reality and COVID-19 would also kill 70 million people. The latest figures this year, however, show a lower though still horrific global COVID death toll of over seven million since 2020, with more than 700 million people infected.

In many other aspects of the movie, the depiction of events was frighteningly accurate. The scenes brought back COVID nightmares: the speedy death following infection, the terrifying loneliness of mandatory isolation for the infected, panic buying and empty supermarket shelves, the initial lack of masks and personal protective equipment, the use of face shields, the fear of catching the coronavirus from fomites, and the desperate rush to develop a vaccine.

One thing that prevented the COVID death toll from hitting 70 million, unlike in the movie: not even the WHO consultants for “Contagion” predicted the development of messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, which allowed the rollout of peer-reviewed COVID vaccines with unprecedented speed.

Today scientists continue to develop new vaccines as the coronavirus keeps mutating.

 Still, thanks to the globalized environment that allows pathogen transmission at breakneck speed, the period between pandemics is becoming shorter. Scientists themselves are wondering if the world is ready for the next pandemic.

*      *      *

In the Philippines, at least people have become familiar with minimum health safety protocols to reduce infection risks.

 Future enforcement of such protocols will likely be less draconian than what Rodrigo Duterte did for two years, which led to the country’s worst recession since World War II.

 And if the next pandemic again originates in China, at least under the current administration, there will be much less trust of official Chinese statements due to their lack of transparency regarding killer viruses emanating from their country. 

We could learn more from Taiwan, which had one of the best initial responses to COVID, probably because it was left to fend for itself by the WHO and had learned its lessons well from the SARS outbreak. 

Philippine public health care, however, remains generally inadequate, and the exodus of health professionals for greener pastures abroad continues. 

We also remain fully dependent on other countries for all sorts of vaccines. Despite COVID’s grievous human and economic toll, the creation of a Virology Institute of the Philippines (VIP) seems to be stuck in the realm of aspiration.

Several bills were filed for the creation of the VIP back in 2020. But this was a time when everyone seemed helpless as COVID killed relentlessly with no vaccine available. Lawmakers wanted to show that they were trying to do something, anything, to fight the COVID threat.

 That was the previous Congress. Today, with the pandemic declared over, Congress is busy with Charter change and reelection strategies for 2025. Medicine, science and technology are no longer top of mind for policy makers.

*      *      *

In the meantime, wildlife – believed to be the source of many of the deadliest viruses in this century – continue to be displaced from their habitats or are caught for food, and are made to intermingle with livestock.

Inspired by the Nipah virus that originated in Malaysia in 1997 from bats and pigs, “Contagion” showed the source of the pandemic in the movie as bats that were displaced by a tree-clearing operation conducted by the company of Matt Damon’s character Mitch Emhoff. A virus-carrying bat evicted from its tree home sought refuge in a pig farm, ate a banana, with the leftover falling to the ground and eaten by a pig, whose carcass was later prepared for cooking by the chef who shook Paltrow’s hand.

SARS-CoV-2 is commonly found in bats. While bats are not common in Wuhan, scientists say other wildlife sold in the city’s market could have been infected by bats before being caught. Another theory, based on stories from Chinese doctors themselves, is that the COVID virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where bat viruses were being studied. 

Such lab “spillovers” of killer pathogens remain possible, and scientists are warning that the world should be ready for the next pandemic.

I watched “Contagion” as the world marked one year since the WHO announced the end of COVID as a public health emergency. That announcement in May last year, however, was accompanied with a warning that COVID remained a global threat, with constantly evolving variants that could lead to fresh surges in illness and deaths.

 Is the Philippines ready for the next pandemic?